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Wednesday, 23 November 2016

Lesson 1

Stop Dropping Your G's; Enunciation Matters

Speech Skill: Clarity

Welcome to the Speak for Success communication chapter. This speech lesson,
like all the lessons in the course, follows a format that explains the
speech problem and presents several exercises so you can work on the problem.
Each lesson closes with a homework assignment designed to provide further
practice eliminating or correcting the speech problem that you’re working with
that particular week.

To get the most out of this course, you need to follow the
program, working on only one lesson each week and completing all the exercises
and homework assignments.

Ready? Of course you are! The speech problem of sloppy enunciation is the
topic for this week.

The Speech Problem

For listeners, one of the most irritating speech habits is a speaker that
doesn’t enunciate clearly. When you don’t bother to pronounce each syllable of
each word properly and words get slurred together, you sound uneducated. Worse,
your listener has a hard time hearing you – especially if there’s other noise
around you or when you’re speaking on the phone.
Dropping “g”s is one of the most common examples of poor enunciation. Say
this list of words out loud:

Going

Walking

Jogging

Thinking

Striking

Selling

Did you say “go-ing” or did you say “go-in”? If you said “go-in” (or
“walk-in”, “jog-gin”, etc.), you’re a G-dropper.
Be warned; this was not a fair test.

Pronouncing words in isolation is very different than what we
normally do when we speak.

Say these sentences out loud:

I’m
going to have to rethink that bid.

Waiting
to hear back from the bank is very nerve-wracking and stressful.

Before
starting my business, I looked at a lot of different business
opportunities.

There’s
more to learning than just reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Did you drop any Gs? Did you enunciate each syllable of each word?

Speech Exercise: The Mirror Face Test

A mirror is a great aid when you’re working on your enunciation. I call this
the face test. When you’re enunciating properly, your mouth, tongue, lips and
jaw move.
Stand in front of a mirror and watch yourself while you say, “I’m going to
have to rethink that bid”. See how your lips purse and retract when you say
“go-ing”? See how your lips jut out to pronounce the “b” in “bid”? This one
sentence is a real face workout.
Say the rest of the sentences out loud, watching yourself speak in the
mirror. Now say them all again, slowing down your rate of speech and
exaggerating the facial movements.
This week, you should have a mirror session of five minutes every day.
You’ll immediately notice that this practice will carry over into your “normal”
speaking life, causing you to be more conscious of the way you speak and speak
more clearly.Additional Speech Exercise: Tongue
Twisters

Speech Exercise: Enlist a Speech Monitor

Because it’s so hard to perform naturally when we’re focusing on speaking
well, the best way to determine whether or not we’re enunciating properly when
we speak and stop slurring and mumbling is to enlist a speech monitor.
It’s a lot easier for someone else to pick up on our sloppy speech habits
than to hear ourselves. For convenience, choose someone that lives with you
(spouse, child, or roommate), explain that you’re working on your enunciation,
and ask him or her to tell you whenever you drop a G or don’t speak clearly.
Keep track of how often your speech monitor tells you you’ve committed this
speech offense.
There are some other aspect, such as; Gross Linguistic Error, MTI and so
on…In that context my readers should be aware of MTI, I’m thinking that, but
what’s GLE? Its nothing but the mistake we tend to make while we are
translating any sentence exactly the same, without gauging the outcome.
Suppose, we Indians are pretty much habituated with our own tongue into English
to some extent, whose English meaning is null, e.g. Arrey, Matlab, ‘I told you
toh’, etc.
What you should see, as you continue to practice speaking clearly, is the
number of times your speech monitor hears you speaking sloppily decrease.
Ready for the pressure situation? Ask someone who works with you regularly
to be a speech monitor.

The Benefits of Enunciation

As your enunciation improves, your listeners will:

Form a
better impression of you as you speak, thinking of you as an educated,
knowledgeable person, more worthy of trust.

Be
better able to focus on the message you’re communicating, rather than
being distracted by the way you’re expressing yourself.

Speech Lesson 1 Homework Assignment

To get the most out of this course, as I said, it’s important that you do
the exercises. Your speech won’t improve unless you work at it regularly.
This time, you have two tasks;

Set
aside five minutes a day where you can work with a mirror in a quiet place
and practice the enunciation exercises above;

Enlist
at least one speech monitor to help you catch your speech errors.